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Multimedia
Feature Article Demonstration, With Audio and Animation
Parellelogram
Slashes Training Cost With a Sound Idea By Henry Glockenshpiel PHOENIX--Almost two years after Parallelogram Industries first deployed its intranet, the company has now incorporated the IP concoction into just about every facet of its normal operations. Amidst the sea of application, procedural and remote site implications, Parallelogram IT administrator Barry Johnson quickly realized that the frequent online training plans meant that his staff needed to quickly learn a lot more about streaming media, especially streaming audio. "In the long term, we all knew that this would save a lot of money and make training an order of magnitude easier," says Johnson, a 14-year veteran of the $9 billion manufacturing conglomerate headquartered here. "But in the short term, the IT department knew that this effort would be a grade A headache." Back in March, Johnson reviewed more than two dozen audio editing programs, looking for one that struck the right balance between sophistication and ease-of-use for his non-audio-savvy helpdesk people. Parallelogram ultimately decided to license SoundForge 4.5 from Sonic Foundry. "To get started and do the basics took virtually no training," Johnson says. "But it also has a ton of functionality that we'll be able to use later, when we're ready and need it." Johnson began recording all training sessions with the company's top managers. He would then take the recordings and digitize them on his IBM Thinkpad 770Z laptop.
The key advantage to SoundForge 4.5 is its production speed. Johnson says he could bring audio into his PC for editing in virtually realtime. A one-minute answer, for example, would take just about one minute to digitize.
Initially, Johnson was worried about the high cost of purchasing digital recorders and related high-end gear. But he quickly concluded that it wasn't necessary to purchase digital recorders because of the nature of streaming media. Streaming audio breaks audio files into small manageable chunks, thereby letting listeners hear the beginning of an audio cut very quickly, while the remainder of the cut is still downloading. It can also do this in a way that makes bandwidth much less of an issue so that a 28K analog connection can work as well as a T3 connection. The downside is that streamed files are highly compressed. That makes the files much smaller, but it also makes the sound quality much weaker and muddier. Given that Johnson's audience-even those accessing the intranet from the corporate LAN, as well as those on the road and working from home-would be listening to the file streamed, the improvement in clarity permitted by digital recording would be lost many times over. The end result would literally sound identical, making the additional cost of digital equipment untenable. In the future, as streaming audio clarity improves, digital equipment would be an improvement, but the changeover could happen at any point. Johnson says he would lose nothing by waiting. But Johnson discovered another problem as he reviewed the tape-recordings. His executives sounded brilliant and articulate when they presented, but listening to the tapes without gestures and facial expressions presented a very different picture. His senior management routinely littered their speech with "uh" and "umm" and "y'know" and they stopped and started sentences whenever a new thought popped into their heads. With SoundForge 4.5 Johnson was able to very effectively delete and fix the executives' comments, move comments around and delete distracting background sounds, such as telephones ringing or an air-conditioner hum.
The payoff came last
week, Johnson says, when he was able to improve the variety and speed
of the company's online training programs, while simultaneously cutting
the cost by 60%. "I must say," Johnson says. "that when I reported those
numbers to my CEO, it had a really nice sound to it."
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Hear and see Johnson demonstrate the simple setup mechanism for his audio-to-digital
process. 
